Mick Jagger has been famous for sixty years and has maintained throughout that time the specific confidence of a man who knows precisely where he sits in the hierarchy of things and is entirely comfortable there. He is not recklessly unkind — he has learned, over six decades of interviews, the diplomatic language of public discourse — but he is also not a man who conceals his assessments behind empty politeness. When Jagger finds something unimpressive, the finding tends to surface.
1. Oasis Jagger’s comments about Oasis have been consistent across the years in which Oasis were claiming, loudly and repeatedly, to be the greatest band in the world. He has described them as a good singles band — a compliment calibrated precisely to exclude the deeper assessment they were seeking. Noel Gallagher responded to Jagger-adjacent dismissals with characteristic restraint, by which I mean without any restraint at all. The mutual non-admiration has never escalated into anything more specific, which is probably fortunate for everyone involved.
2. Punk Rock Generally Jagger’s relationship with punk is the most documented of his musical dismissals because punk was, in significant part, a reaction against exactly what Jagger represented — the bloated, self-important, stadium-filling rock aristocracy that had lost its danger and its connection to the street. The Sex Pistols named the Stones specifically as one of the dinosaurs that needed replacing. Jagger responded by noting that the Stones had been dangerous before the punk musicians were born and would be dangerous after they were finished, which was both accurate and entirely missed the point the punks were making. Both sides were right. Neither would admit it.
3. Disco The late 1970s produced Jagger’s most public and most complicated musical position — the Stones made Miss You, which is structurally a disco record, while Jagger was simultaneously making dismissive comments about disco as a genre. Keith Richards has never let him forget this. The contradiction is not quite hypocrisy — Jagger was genuinely interested in the rhythmic sophistication of disco while finding its cultural associations limiting — but it is the kind of productive inconsistency that makes Jagger interesting to follow across decades.
4. Coldplay The comments about Coldplay are recent enough to be reported carefully. Jagger has expressed, in the diplomatic language of a man who has been interviewed enough times to know how to say unflattering things without headlines, that Coldplay’s approach to stadium rock represents a different set of priorities than the Stones have ever operated with. He has specifically mentioned the gap between Coldplay’s emotional register — earnest, expansive, designed for communal warmth — and the Stones’ edge. He did not say Coldplay were bad. He communicated that they were not what he considers interesting.
5. The Monkees The 1960s position on the Monkees was shared by virtually every serious rock musician of the period — the manufactured nature of the band, the fact that they did not initially play their own instruments on recordings, the television origins — and Jagger expressed it with the directness that was common coin among the serious rock community of 1967. The Monkees sold more records than the Stones in 1967. This fact has never been part of Jagger’s public commentary on the subject.
The Band He Was Terrified Of: The Who Jagger has said, in interviews that are harder to find than his dismissals, that the Who in their prime were the one band that genuinely unsettled him as a live proposition. That going on after the Who — or before them — was the one situation in which he felt the Stones’ supremacy as a live act was genuinely in question. Keith Moon’s drumming, Townshend’s physical intensity, Daltrey’s voice, Entwistle’s bass — the combination produced a live experience that Jagger has said was the most purely exciting thing he witnessed from another band in the 1960s. He has rarely said this loudly. It is the kind of admission that Mick Jagger makes quietly.